Publications by authors named "Ashby N"

Article Synopsis
  • The initiative 2030 In Sight and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness aim to reduce preventable vision loss globally, prioritizing the need for eye health data in East Africa, a region with high rates of childhood blindness and severe visual impairment.
  • Recent studies (1995 and 2009) highlighted the causes of these conditions, but updated data is necessary to track current trends.
  • An analysis of eight articles involving 534 cases from six countries identified common causes of childhood blindness, mainly linked to the cornea and cataract, and recognized systemic relations to diseases like measles and toxoplasmosis, suggesting a need for further investigation into these associations.
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Childhood blindness is an issue of global health impact, affecting approximately 2 million children worldwide. Vision 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals previously identified childhood blindness as a key issue in the twentieth century, and while public health measures are underway, the precise etiologies and management require ongoing investigation and care, particularly within resource-limited settings such as sub-Saharan Africa. We systematically reviewed the literature on childhood blindness in West Africa to identify the anatomic classification and etiologies, particularly those causes of childhood blindness with systemic health implications.

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Donation after cardiac death (DCD) is a growing source of organs for transplantation. DCD can be challenging to understand due to variations in practice. DCD also holds great potential for ethical compromise making it uncomfortable for many practitioners.

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Background: Body image scanners are used in industry and research to reliably provide a wealth of anthropometric measurements within seconds. The demonstrated utility of the scanners drives the current proliferation of more commercially available devices that rely on their own reference body sites and proprietary algorithms to output anthropometric measurements. Since each scanner relies on its own algorithms, measurements obtained from different scanners cannot directly be combined or compared.

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Infectious keratitis is a devastating cause of vision loss worldwide. Cutibacterium acnes ( C. acnes ), a commensal bacterium of the skin and ocular surface, is an underrecognized but important cause of bacterial keratitis.

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The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own than to the same item when they do not own it, and this effect is often taken to reflect an ownership-induced change in the intrinsic value people assign to the object. However recent evidence shows that valuations made by buyers and sellers are influenced by market prices provided for the individual products, suggesting a role for beliefs about the markets. Here we elicit individuals' beliefs about whole distributions of market prices, enabling us to quantify whether or not a given transaction constitutes a "good deal" and to demonstrate how an endowment effect may reflect such considerations.

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Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to increases in felt negative affect for many. This is concerning as individuals at increased risk for mental health issues are often more likely to use substances to cope with stressors.

Objectives: The aim of the current study is to examine whether communities reporting an increased risk for developing mental health issues showed differential patterns of legal cannabis use as the pandemic began.

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Objectives: Continuing professional development is essential for healthcare professionals to maintain and acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to provide person centred, safe and effective care. This is particularly important in the rapidly changing healthcare context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite recognition of its importance in the United Kingdom, minimum required hours for re-registration, and related investment, have been small compared to other countries.

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Objective: This study aimed to examine the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on patronage to unhealthy eating establishments in populations with obesity.

Methods: Anonymized movement data accounting for roughly 10% of devices in the United States at 138,989 unhealthy eating locations from December 1, 2019, through April 2020 and the percentage of adults with obesity, the poverty rate, and the food environment index in 65% of United States counties were collected and merged. A cluster corrected Poisson spline regression was performed predicting patronage by day, the percentage of adults with obesity in the establishment's county, the county's poverty rate, and its food environment index, as well as their interactions.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a significant increase in the number of patients requiring relatively prolonged invasive mechanical ventilation and an associated surge in patients who need a tracheostomy to facilitate weaning from respiratory support. In parallel, there has been a global increase in guidance from professional bodies representing staff who care for patients with tracheostomies at different points in their acute hospital journey, rehabilitation and recovery. Of concern are the risks to healthcare staff of infection arising from tracheostomy insertion and caring for patients with a tracheostomy.

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In Ashby, Konstantinidis, and Yechiam (2017) we argued that the variance in people's choices in decisions from experience stems from uncertainty about preferences. This was confirmed by high correlations between the variance in experiential choices and subsequent one-shot policy decisions: both showing considerable diversification. In the present paper we address a comment regarding our paper by Plonsky and Teodorescu (2020).

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In two studies we provide a novel investigation into the effects of monetary switching costs on choice-inertia (i.e., selection of the same option on consecutive choices).

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Sensitivity to losses has been found to vary greatly across individuals. One explanation for this variability is that for some losses garner more visual attention and are subsequently given more weight in decision-making processes. In three studies we examined whether biases in visual attention toward potential losses during valuation and choice were related to loss sensitivity, as well as the valuations provided and the choices made.

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Rationale: Over-the-counter drugs containing Hypericum perforatum (H. perforatum) have been argued to improve memory and sustained attention. So far, these claims have not been supported in human studies.

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The majority of the literature on the psychology of gains and losses suggests that losses lead to an avoidance response. Several studies, however, have shown that losses can also lead to an approach response, whereby an option is selected more often when it produces losses. In five studies we examine the boundary conditions for these contradictory approach and avoidance effects.

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This paper discusses the results of a simulation of a time scale based on continuously operating commercial hydrogen masers and an optical frequency standard that does not operate continuously as a clock. The simulation compares the performance of this time scale with one that is based on the same commercial devices but incorporates a continuously operating cesium fountain instead of the optical standard. The results are independent of the detailed characteristics of the optical frequency standard; the only requirement is that the optical device be much more stable than the masers in the ensemble.

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Economic bubbles are an empirical puzzle because they do not readily fit the notion of an efficient market. We argue that bubbles are associated with a conflict and a gap in the allocation of effort during negotiation by sellers and buyers. We examined 21 experimental asset markets where in one condition players could buy and sell and in the other they could either buy or sell.

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Arithmetic facts can be solved using different strategies. Research suggests that some arithmetic problems, particularly those solved by fact retrieval, are related to phonological processing ability and elicit activity in left-lateralized brain regions that support phonological processing. However, it is unclear whether common brain regions support both retrieval-based arithmetic and phonological processing, and if these regions differ across children and adults.

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Patients with increased intracranial pressure generally require pharmacologic therapies and often more definitive treatments, such as surgical intervention. The overall goal of these interventions is to maintain or re-establish adequate cerebral blood flow and prevent herniation. Regardless of the cause of increased intracranial pressure, osmotherapy is considered the mainstay of medical therapy, and should be administered as soon as possible.

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A large body of empirical research has examined the impact of trading perspective on pricing of consumer products, with the typical finding being that selling prices exceed buying prices (i.e., the endowment effect).

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Confidence Estimates in Simulation of Phase Noise or Spectral Density.

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control

May 2017

In this paper, we apply the method of discrete simulation of power-law noise, developed by Timmer and König, Ashby, and Ashby and Patla, to the problem of simulating phase noise for a combination of power-law noises. We derive analytic expressions for the probability of observing a value of phase noise L(f) or of any of the one-sided spectral densities S(f), S(f) , or S(f) , for arbitrary superpositions of power-law noise.

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The rate of selecting different options in the decisions-from-feedback paradigm is commonly used to measure preferences resulting from experiential learning. While convergence to a single option increases with experience, some variance in choice remains even when options are static and offer fixed rewards. Employing a decisions-from-feedback paradigm followed by a policy-setting task, we examined whether the observed variance in choice is driven by factors related to the paradigm itself: Continued exploration (e.

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Major trauma services in the UK underwent reform in April 2012, following reports that trauma care in England was 'unacceptable' and in need of desperate change, and urgent recommendations were made to improve coordination, costs, and information about trauma care to avoid unnecessary deaths. Following the reconfiguration of services, NHS England highlighted the need for nurse key-workers, or coordinators, to support patients through the major trauma pathway and into rehabilitation. This article examines the literature on the coordinator role to understand its function in UK and international major trauma networks.

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Recent research makes increasing use of eye-tracking methodologies to generate and test process models. Overall, such research suggests that attention, generally indexed by fixations (gaze duration), plays a critical role in the construction of preference, although the methods used to support this supposition differ substantially. In 2 studies we empirically test prototypical versions of prominent processing assumptions against 1 another and several base models.

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